Met Office Forecasts ‘Dry With Bright Spells’ for Thursday; Perth Declares a Major Incident
Council opens emergency sun centres as residents are urged to 'stay indoors, keep calm and locate their sunglasses, if they own any'.
The Tay at Perth, photographed in conditions forecasters have described as 'unusually visible'. Video: AI-generated dramatisation by Perthetic; poster photo below credited. Photo: Simon Armstrong, “Perth Tay Bridge”, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
PERTH — Perth and Kinross was placed on high alert last night after the Met Office forecast that Thursday would be “dry with bright spells”, a phrase which emergency planners said they had “only ever seen in training exercises.”
“We’ve prepared for rain. We’ve prepared for heavy rain. We’ve prepared for rain that comes sideways off the Tay and gets into your soul,” said a council resilience officer, unboxing a sunhat with visible distress. “But dry, with bright spells? On a Thursday? In October? There’s no protocol. Someone found a binder from 2018 marked ‘Sunny Day — Do Not Open’. It just said ‘Panic’.”
The forecast for Central, Tayside and Fife says Tuesday will be “largely cloudy with rain”, turning heavier, and Wednesday wet before “brightening up later”. Then, for one day only, Thursday is expected to be dry. By Friday, normal service resumes, with the region “turning rather wet and windy.”
Residents have been issued with guidance. People are advised not to look directly at the sky, to approach any warm patch of pavement slowly, and to check on elderly neighbours who “may not have experienced a bright spell since the Commonwealth Games.”
Supermarkets reported panic-buying of ice lollies, a single bottle of factor 50 that has reportedly sat on a Perth shelf since 2019, and disposable barbecues, which officials stress must not be lit “just because the sun’s out for twenty minutes.”
At press time, forecasters had moved to calm nerves, confirming that the bright spells would be “brief, patchy and entirely survivable”, and that the long-range outlook, “changeable and at times unsettled”, meant Perth would soon be “safely back to normal.”
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